The reason I haven’t blogged in over a month is that I have acquired yet another hobby, quite by accident.

It all started when I decided to get off my butt and do some running, something I hadn’t done in about four years.

In defence of this seeming laziness, I would like to retort that “time flies”.

So I went running, although I’m using the term “running” very loosely here. My 5 km journey consisted of about 20% running and 80% walking while my eyes bugged like a goldfish’s and my lungs expressed their indignation by having angry fits.

That first run was very painful, and the biggest issue wasn’t even my rebelling lungs. It was the cold.

It was my first time running in England and I wasn’t prepared for the demands of working out in 10°C temperatures and strong winds. My ears froze painfully even while my body burned up from the exercise. It gave me a severe migraine — the head-splitting, I’m-honestly-going-die, kind.

After that traumatising experience, I theorised that I could prevent future migraines by wearing ear warmers during my runs, so I went online to shop for some. To cut the long story short, I found too many I liked and couldn’t decide which to buy, so I decided to knit my own.

The only problem was that I didn’t know how to knit.

But that was a problem easily solved. Piers’ mum is a good knitter so I went to her for a quick tutorial and a loan of knitting needles, and then I was ready to knit my ears the most beautiful and luxurious pair of ear warmers.

And here, I present, my masterpiece.

You can hardly see the unevenness and botchiness once you put it on your head, really.

See?

Of course, I didn’t go through all the trouble of learning how to knit just to knit myself a plain old headband that looks like a five-year-old’s school project. I needed to decorate it. So I went online to learn how to knit a heart and thus made this.

Piers was very impressed. He said, “That is amazing! You can turn it any way and it still looks like a heart!”

My three-headed heart was the result of my not bothering to do it properly. To make a proper likeness of any shape, you have to knit a tension patch, do some calculations, draw a customised grid, draw your shape on the grid, then knit your pattern.

I was too impatient the first time.

But then, I felt my first heart couldn’t pass off as a nice splotch, much less a heart, so I invested the few hours to do it right.

Much better.

Could be improved but I had used up my quota of patience for now. I couldn’t wait to sew the heart on and finish my project.

Having finished it, I felt as proud as any five-year-old after completing an art project. I was quite excited to wear it, even if I felt a bit self-conscious about my dodgy stitches and uneven lines.

And then, suddenly, the temperature went up and I didn’t need ear warmers anymore. The next time I went running (about a week later), it was warm enough so I didn’t even need a jumper.

So all that work went for naught, except I suddenly realised the possibilities of entire new wardrobes of DIY clothes and accessories.

And that’s what I’ve been occupied with the last month.

I’ve made this silly-looking thing which currently functions as a Kindle cover and I’m currently knitting a very small shoulder bag. My choices are now based solely on the level of difficulty (easiness) of the project rather than on actual need of the end product.

I bought a basket to store current projects and carry them around. Stupid things like that motivate me and make me happy.

Piers has been nothing but amused at my new-found hobby, calling me an “auntie” when my needles click away while we’re on the sofa together watching TV.

He’s refusing to believe that knitting has become a trendy thing to do and that many Hollywood celebrities do it. I pointed out that the Duchess of Cambridge Kate has also just started to knit, and she’s a very fashionable person, so there, but he said that it’s okay for her because she’s knitting for her coming baby, so she’s not “auntie” or “granny”.

Piers has what I call Selective Logic Deficiency, which means he passes illogic off as logic if it suits his argument, even if it makes him sound like a complete idiot.

Actually, many people have this disease but I don’t care about other people, whereas I have to live with Piers, so it is very annoying.

Still, he is supporting my hobby financially and doesn’t complain when packages keep turning up in the post and invoiced to him, so that makes up for it very much.

Now, though, I need to get off this obsession enough to get back running again.

And blogging.

I am going to blog more now. Really. Promise this time!

Piers is away in Amsterdam with his buddies so I’m enjoying a weekend of solitude, the happiest feature of which is that I can have candy for breakfast without being told off.

On a normal day, we would Skype (since MSN has shut down) while he’s at work and I’m at home. And we’d exchange notes about our respective meals. I know it makes us sound like rather drab people but there’s an element of competition to it.

“I’m having a giant breakfast of bacon, eggs, mushrooms, tomatoes, baked beans and toast. What are YOU having?”

“Pfft. Sounds boring. I’M having Rowntrees Sour Pastilles! :D”

Then the scolding comes.

“You can’t have sweets for breakfast!”

“Why not?”

“It’s not a proper breakfast!”

“It’s made with 25% real fruit juice!”

Okay, maybe that just makes us sound sad.

BUT this weekend he is away, so, while we still exchange meal notes via phone text, he is less eligible to be judgemental of my meal choices because he himself is not in any position to be Mr Healthy, right now.

Piers has gone away to Amsterdam for three days to celebrate(?) one of his mate’s upcoming marriage. Yes, it’s a 3D2N stag party and I don’t need to tell you what men do at stag parties. What more a stag party in Amsterdam involving 10 hot-blooded males.

Okay, I’ll tell you anyway.

They drink beer. Enough beer to displace every ounce of fluid in the human body, including the brain, which begets a vicious cycle of poor choices.

(From Wikipedia: “The total amount of water in a man of average weight (70 kilograms) is approximately 40 litres.”)

Here’s a look at the first half of their itinerary (because it’s still happening even as I’m blogging). The times are approximate because I’ve had to piece everything together from sporadic text messages.

Friday

1:30 pm – Arrive in Amsterdam.

4:30 pm – Arrive in rented apartment after picking up keys, commuting a terrible distance and getting supplies (read: beer) at supermarket.

5:00 pm – Drink beer in apartment while taking turns to shower (1 tiny bathroom shared by 10).

7:00 pm – Have dinner and beer at Irish pub.

8:00 pm – Drink beer at an ice bar (where every bloody thing is made of ice).

XtraCold IceBar Amsterdam. Not sure if this is the one they went to but this seems to be the famous one.

9:40 pm – Move to another bar to drink more beer.

12:40 am – Move to yet another bar to drink yet more beer. (A few of them went home at this point.)

Saturday

7:30 am – Take turns to wash up in tiny bathroom. (Piers reported that this took 3 hours, which sounds ridiculous, but I calculate that it’s only 18 minutes per bloke, a miracle, conjecturing that it would have taken 10 hours if it had been women.)

11:00 am – Brunch at Subway. (To get rid of hangover before the real adventure begins.)

12:00 pm – Heineken factory tour.

2:00 pm – Drink beer in a bar and smoke cigars.

5:00 pm – Beer bike adventure. (This is a vehicular monster powered by beer guzzling cyclists. They have rented it for 2 hours.)

TBC…

This is as far as I know because it’s only Saturday afternoon right now, although I am given the impression that tonight is the big drinking night.

Wow, really? You mean Friday wasn’t?

It is not such a stretch now to believe that each of these blokes is going to contain 40 litres of beer in his body by the end of tonight, is it?

I am so wracked with envy.

Instead of enjoying wondrous experiences such as drinking ice cold beer while sitting on a chair made of ice and putting my elbows on a table made of ice, instead of cycling through the colourful streets of Amsterdam, City of Freedom, pedalling nonstop for two hours while drinking beer out of a giant barrel, instead of drinking beer for 60 hours till I’m capable of sweating beer if only it weren’t so darned cold in Europe now, instead of all that, I am stuck at home playing as much as I want on my iPad, eating anything I want at any time, and looking forward to the premiere of Britain’s Got Talent 2013 on TV tonight.

I am so missing out.

Cheers.

Now, my iPad beckons! I bought 2 new games yesterday (on Piers’ credit card since he’s gone and left me alone {although that’s just a convenient excuse since I buy any games I want any time I want to on his account because I needed a UK credit card to buy games here, hee}.)

I have about two hours to play until BGT, so yay.

My only hope is that Piers and his pals come home in one piece (I mean, a piece each, not collectively) because I’m a bit worried about spontaneous explosion due to liquid overload.

So, wish them well for me.

Have a great rest of the weekend, guys, and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!

As if.

The first thing I noticed about the Kindle was that, when you first open up a new book, it invariably starts you off at the first chapter of the book. It skips the cover, the copyright information, acknowledgements, quotations, dedications, maps, genealogy tables, author’s notes, etc, sometimes even prologues, conveniently allowing you to get started reading the book NOW.

Yes, there are people who prefer to bypass what they consider pointless drivel and get started on the action. There are people who do not want to read anything outside the main story, do not read the back of cereal boxes, do not RTFM.

Sure, I get that.

But what about the rest of us who appreciate the time taken by actual people who write the back of cereal boxes and want to know what they have to say? Why is there no option to default to starting a book from the cover? What of an artist’s effort in designing a cover?

I am quite offended by this feature. How can Amazon presuppose that I do not want to see all of the above-mentioned pages? A cursory Google search reveals that many readers think as I do and lament the lack of choice in the matter of a book’s starting point. Like me, many readers would always make the few screen taps (or keypresses) to move to the cover of the book and start there.

Although there is a relatively quick workaround, it is an annoyance because it happens every book. It is much the same kind of annoyance you might get with having to close a hundred ads before you can play a mobile game these days.

Reading the pages between the cover and the first chapter is not merely to satisfy a curiosity or to gather information. For me, it is a sacred ritual.

It goes back to the days of my childhood when I would get a new book and stare at the cover in eager anticipation of the joy that I would unearth within. I would let the anticipation build up as I turn each page over, ever so carefully, reading almost every word (but skimming the copyright information since they’re always about the same and not quite important).

Every page turned and read before the story starts only serves to heighten the anticipation so that, by the time you get to the first chapter, the build-up has burst out in a delightful shower, bathing you in a profound joy that makes the beginning of a read a most special occasion.

That is the delicious ritual of starting a new book. Admittedly, the effect is keener with physical books but one has to move with the times and adapt. Digital books are the future because my poor old bookshelf has long ago burst at the seams, the resulting explosion causing precious books to all but vaporise. (No, seriously, I have lost untold numbers of precious books because I’ve had to leave them around everywhere due to overpopulation in designated book receptacles.)

But rituals! Rituals can still be preserved without renouncing technology. Let us open the book from the cover so that the devastation to the romance of reading, wrought by digital evolution, is not total annihilation. Do this one little thing to keep technology from dousing the last remaining ember left in the magic of reading a book.

I hope Amazon will wake up their idea and, while at it, see if they can’t do anything about the ridiculous number of typos found in ebooks. While proof-reading remains the domain of individual publishers, Kindle is Amazon’s domain so I’m sure they can at least do something about the books sold in their format.

Yes, I am a demanding customer because I do 90% of my shopping on Amazon these days, for everything, not just books. So give me quality and my money’s worth! Give me back the magic!

A few months ago, I started experiencing a loss of appetite and it has been really disconcerting.

If you have been following my blog over the years, you might have concluded that I was an irredeemable glutton, such was my penchant to share endless gastronomical conquests, replete with mouthwatering photos.

I have loved food, especially unhealthy junk food, all my life. Barring the occasional loss of appetite due to temporal sickness, depression or jetlag, I’ve always lived to eat and looked forward to every meal with hungry impatience, always dreaming of all sorts of savoury delights rolling around my taste buds.

And then, all of that suddenly gone. Almost overnight.

I woke up one day and found no urge to eat. No food excited me, not even my favourite things, and I have many of those, trust me. One day rolled into two days, which rolled into one month, two months.

Piers would ask me, “If you could have anything to eat right now, anything at all, what would it be?” And I would say, “Nothing at all!”

Putting something into my mouth to chew and swallow started seeming a bit like a chore, even when I was hungry. I did still occasionally enjoy tasty food, but the enjoyment would be at about 30% of what it should have been.

“O.M.G. I’ve died and gone to heaven” became “Okay, this is quite tasty so it’s less of a chore to eat”.

At first I thought it was because I was sick of the food in England, since the variety there is quite limited, and I’ve always craved variety. I thought my appetite would go back to normal once I was back in Singapore and I looked forward to eating all the food I missed.

But I came back to Singapore and nothing changed. Faced with all the best food you could find in the whole wide world, my appetite remain unmoved.

It has been two weeks since I’ve returned to Singapore and I have woken up with dismay every day, no urge to eat, thinking of each day wasted that I’m not scarfing down chwee kueh for breakfast, chicken rice for lunch and chilli crab for dinner. I’m only in Singapore for six weeks.

But I just have no interest in eating, whatsoever.

My mind ruminated all the possible reasons. Prolonged jetlag? General malaise from having finished my course and undecided on my next step? Old age? I did use to wonder as a kid why adults never seemed to want to eat tidbits all day, even when they had all the money and freedom to do so.

And then, today, I suddenly put two and two together and discovered the culprit of my malediction. It is the stupid Omega 3 fish oil capsules I’ve been taking daily since Novemeber last year!

It didn’t cross my mind that something like that would suppress my appetite. I started taking it a month before my exams because our psychology lecturer told us that fish oils supplements have been proven to boost brain function. After that, I continued taking it because I noticed that my skin was getting smoother, too.

I think my appetite might have started buggering off around that time. I had then stocked my snack cupboard to the ridiculous brim for the exam period, expecting it to be all gone within weeks. After my exams, the cupboard remained untouched, still stocked well enough to last me through an apocalypse and a half.

(I don’t have a photo of my snack cupboard in England, but it’s bigger than this one I had in Singapore about 5 years ago.)

After my exams, I would literally not eat until about 7 pm when Piers would get home from work and we would have dinner together. For a couple of months, there were many days in which I ate just one meal a day. (Other days, I would force myself to eat something in the day.) But dinner would be a huge meal, which made up the calories my sedentary lifestyle needed, although it was probably not too good for general health.

So, today, I woke up and I looked at the bottle of fish oil capsules on my table and something clicked in my brain. I got up and Googled “fish oil suppresses appetite” and there was my answer.

While the evidence is compelling — the articles confirm it and my timeline fits — I can’t say for sure that fish oil is the main cause of my lost appetite. I suppose I will have to stop taking it for a while to see if the good ol’ appetite comes back. I only have 3.5 weeks left to eat my fill in Singapore!

If I am right, then I have found a way for me to maintain a healthy diet while at the same time benefit from the multitudes of health benefits of this supplement. I’ve never been able to stick to a healthy diet plan for my junk food cravings always got the better of me.

So, yay?

I do miss foodgasms, though, so now I’m kinda undecided what to do.

By the way, this is not an advertorial for fish oil or a recommendation to try it or whatever. Take it at your own risk and stick with reliable brands!

Just a quick update now cos I’ve been busy and I’m leaving England for Singapore tomorrow!

Actually, that’s all I need to say but since I’m already here, I suppose I could say a few more things.

It’s Valentine’s Day today. I’ve never really been partial to the commercialism of the whole event, not because I think it’s a scam (which it kind of is) but because I think it makes people lazy in relationships, thinking that they’ve got this one day to excessively shower their loved ones with love, and then the rest of the year they can take it easy, take the relationship for granted.

Regardless, I am not above appreciating some Valentine’s Day flowers.

Piers got me tulips instead of roses because he said he couldn’t find roses in colours that I like (white and champagne pink) and he wasn’t overly sure of the exact shade of pink I like, anyway, cos to him, all pinks look the same.

Which is fine because I actually prefer tulips to roses.

Flowers are relatively cheap in England and we can get pretty tulips all year round so Piers was happy to buy me a bunch every week to pretty up our apartment at the beginning of our relationship.

Eventually, though, I told him to stop because I got tired of maintaining them, having to replenish or change the water every so often. I started leaving them to wilt for weeks before I could be arsed to dump them and give the mouldy vase a good clean.

You just can’t please a girl.

But, seriously, since I’m leaving tomorrow, it means Piers has to take care of these tulips and dispose of them when they die, so that’s perfect for me. I am very pleased!

A few days ago, I baked this fresh cream chocolate cake because I felt like eating cake.

It was a bit of a disaster.

It started off being an 8-inch cake and ended up being a 5.5-inch one because I left it in the oven too long and the sides got rock hard so I had to cut them off. Because of that, the sides looked ugly so I decided to cover everything with fresh cream, only I didn’t have enough cream so everything just looked uneven.

If you look on the inside, you can see a hole in the middle filled up with cream:

That was me gouging a hole in the middle of the cake to check if the middle was edible.

It was barely edible, tasting like stale cake because it was so overcooked.

Piers was excited when he saw it, coming home from work. He thought it was his Valentine’s Day cake because of the heart on the top. But that was just me trying to make the cake look less ugly but even then I didn’t do a great job of it.

We each had a small slice for tea and he said, “Wow, that is really delicious!”

And then he said, “Hang on, I need to have a sip of tea. It’s stuck in my throat, need to wash it down with a drink.”

On the bright side, the cream was quite tasty.

Well, I can’t wait to be back in Singapore where I can buy anything I want to eat, without having to try and make it myself, and poisoning my boyfriend in the bargain.

And now I’m off to spend Valentine’s Day with the boyfriend sans poison. We are eating out today.

Happy Valentine’s Day to you all. Hope you have or had a great one, depending on when you read this.